There are many different USB microphones on the market that are suitable for a variety of applications. The Elgato Wave: 3 is best suited for gamers who stream and podcasters who are looking for a microphone that sounds good right out of the box and requires little tweaking. It’s easy to use thanks to built-in level controls, it has a built-in headphone jack for low-latency monitoring, and the signal quality is strong. There is innovative analog-digital hybrid processing in play to protect the signal from overload, which is useful for gamers and podcasters, but may sound a little too processed for musical singers.
The Wave: 3 is a condenser microphone with a black eggshell-like finish and a built-in stand with a round weighted base. The mic and stand are about 8 inches tall and 3.5 inches wide (for the mic), while the base is just over 4 inches in diameter. An included adapter allows you to separate the mic from the base and screw it into a standard mic stand.
[content-egg-block template=offers_logo hide=price]Behind the flat, rectangular grille is a 17mm cardioid electret capsule with a frequency range of 70 Hz to 20 kHz. It has a depth of 24 bits and a maximum sampling rate of 96 kHz, both solid values for this price range. The microphone pattern cannot be switched, so you have to rely on the good old cardioid. So if you want to capture more room sound or address multiple speakers from different angles, you might find the fixed cardioid pattern a bit limiting.
The microphone swivels on the stand and can be tilted up for desktop recording. On the front, below the grille, is a single knob with LEDs to indicate signal level. The knob lets you adjust microphone gain, headphone volume, or mix low-latency audio from the microphone with audio from the connected computer.
At the top is a capacitive mute button; it’s highly sensitive so it works quickly, but touching it results in a tapping noise that’s more noticeable when muted than when unmuted. This isn’t a huge problem, but something to keep in mind if it’s undesirable. On the back is a 3.5 mm headphone jack and a USB-C port for the included USB-C to USB-A cable.